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If you are a linux user, Amarok might be to your liking.

Its a rather nice KDE music player that can do this sort of thing.

http://amarok.kde.org/

I would suggest kmplayer. it integrates better in knoqueror for listening/viewing streamed media online. it has nice features, like the ability to give you the url you're watchong, wich allows you to download it and see it offline if you need to.

Besides, half the apps on your list are toys ... nice toys for a home desktop (yes, amarok and k3b is lovely) but where are the more "serious" apps like scribus? Is there an gtk equivalent? Edutainment? I mention this last because linux might become more and more important in education, and only KDE offers a nice, integrated solution. In fact, I just read about a specific case where schools (in Germany) used KDE because of the edutainment package (was in one of the blogs on kdeplanet).

Which leads me to what I wanted to say originally: marketing. KDE did no or very little marketing, and almost no research of KDE deployment. That's where the "other" project excelled: marketing, case studies, success stories, etc... This way, it was relatively easy for ximian's people to convince Novell's management that they should standardize on GNOME. It was at this year's academy that they decided to form the KDE Marketing Working Group. And in just a few days, oh look: Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE on Novell Linux Desktop that's bye bye for 1000 customers when the next upgrade cycle comes, if Novell standardized on GNOME. They use kiosk mode and the associated admin tools to lock the features - which seems to be a mature feature. In fact, here is an "enterprise ready" praise if there is any:"

At the moment, almost all shops in The Netherlands and Belgium already use the KDE Desktop. After that phase is complete, the migration team will go to Norway and Finland to migrate the PCs used by the Free Record Shop and Bravo chains. "It's a fun project" says Arrachart, "We can show that you can save costs with ICT, while at the same time allowing greater possibilities in the way the shops are organised."

on my right was a fellow who works for a company that makes linux based satelite t.v. transmission software (sky t.v. is amongst their clientelle) and they use qt for their in-house engineering tools. on my left were three men from a vienese company that writes kde software for a group of five private hospitals. these hospitals all run kde on the desktop and everything from patient records to x-rays is handled on them.

Besides, half the apps on your list are toys ... nice toys for a home desktop (yes, amarok and k3b is lovely) but where are the more "serious" apps like scribus? Is there an gtk equivalent? Edutainment? I mention this last because linux might become more and more important in education, and only KDE offers a nice, integrated solution. In fact, I just read about a specific case where schools (in Germany) used KDE because of the edutainment package (was in one of the blogs on kdeplanet).

Which leads me to what I wanted to say originally: marketing. KDE did no or very little marketing, and almost no research of KDE deployment. That's where the "other" project excelled: marketing, case studies, success stories, etc... This way, it was relatively easy for ximian's people to convince Novell's management that they should standardize on GNOME. It was at this year's academy that they decided to form the KDE Marketing Working Group. And in just a few days, oh look: Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE on Novell Linux Desktop that's bye bye for 1000 customers when the next upgrade cycle comes, if Novell standardized on GNOME. They use kiosk mode and the associated admin tools to lock the features - which seems to be a mature feature. In fact, here is an "enterprise ready" praise if there is any:"

At the moment, almost all shops in The Netherlands and Belgium already use the KDE Desktop. After that phase is complete, the migration team will go to Norway and Finland to migrate the PCs used by the Free Record Shop and Bravo chains. "It's a fun project" says Arrachart, "We can show that you can save costs with ICT, while at the same time allowing greater possibilities in the way the shops are organised."

on my right was a fellow who works for a company that makes linux based satelite t.v. transmission software (sky t.v. is amongst their clientelle) and they use qt for their in-house engineering tools. on my left were three men from a vienese company that writes kde software for a group of five private hospitals. these hospitals all run kde on the desktop and everything from patient records to x-rays is handled on them.

Good news all round, it would seem. :)

Indeed, here are some must-have KDE apps that are certainly going to help SuSE's popularity as a desktop operating system :
AmaroK music player -- Intuitive, powerful, good-looking music player. Supports transfers to/from iPods and many audio formats.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

BKSys environment for a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool

Good news all round, it would seem. :)

Indeed, here are some must-have KDE apps that are certainly going to help SuSE's popularity as a desktop operating system :
AmaroK music player -- Intuitive, powerful, good-looking music player. Supports transfers to/from iPods and many audio formats.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

BKSys environment for a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool

Good news all round, it would seem. :)

Indeed, here are some must-have KDE apps that are certainly going to help SuSE's popularity as a desktop operating system :
AmaroK music player -- Intuitive, powerful, good-looking music player. Supports transfers to/from iPods and many audio formats.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

BKSys environment for a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool

Good news all round, it would seem. :)

Indeed, here are some must-have KDE apps that are certainly going to help SuSE's popularity as a desktop operating system :
AmaroK music player -- Intuitive, powerful, good-looking music player. Supports transfers to/from iPods and many audio formats.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

BKSys environment for a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool

This is not about preaching. This is not about pushing ideology. This is about developers maintaining creative control over the kernel, the kernel that they themselves have been building. Exactly what is your problem with this?

You say here that 'not only do users not care about "Free", but they will actively dislike "Free".' While regrettable, that is fine -- that is the users' prerogative. I sincerely expect they will think more highly of "Free" the tighter the IP and DRM restrictions become, but these related issues have been discussed to better effect in many other threads.

The trouble with your argument here is that the folks building and maintaining the Linux kernel (and most of the rest of userland Linux software too) are precisely the people who are concerned with this "Free" that you apparently couldn't give a rat's ass about. This has nothing to do with wanting 'to push their ideoligy [sic] on others', and everything to do with wanting to stay in control. As A nonymous Coward noted, building an unchanging driver API for the convenience of corporates does nothing for the kernel:

A "stable" binary API removes the possibility of keeping everything up to date and would dramatically show down the adoption of new features and general improvements.

Again, this has nothing to do with pushing ideology. This has to do with developers maintaining control over their own project, a project that has been provided to you as a courtesy out of the strong moral belief of many in the OSS community that the tools we use to get our work done should be freely available.

Furthermore, given the significant number of websites devoted to OSS usability concerns (over 17,000 at last count), I think we can safely regard as invalidated your claim that '"Free" software people ... don't care about makeing [sic] functional easy to use systems.' They would indeed seem to care, but specifically within the scope of making free software -- i.e., they are not interested in kowtowing to your whinging demands that they gut their principles solely to make something passably usable right this very moment, and shackle themselves with a rigid driver API that hampers kernel development far into the future and threatens to scuttle years of effort to make a fully-usable computer system that is not beholden to secret vested interests.

You, sir, appear to be crying out that consumer convenience is more important than freedom. This is much in tune with the prevailing cultural trends in the United States. I find this deeply ironic -- "Give me liberty or give me death" has been turned into "give me convenience or I shall whinge", while "the land of the free and the home of the brave" has become "the land of the sheep and the home of the enslaved". While I understand the frustration apparent in your posting regarding when things do not work, I cannot agree with your sentiment. Some things, sir, are more important than instant gratification. I am deeply sorry that you do not appear able to recognize this.

It doesn't apply to this program, but one reason to use an RSS reader would be to get a different interface. For example, I like ticker-style RSS readers, like KNewsTicker.

You want KDE? http://www.kde.org/ Install it if you want. Isn't that the beauty of OSS... options are there for those who dare!

Gnome people, this is not the time to freak out. Just because Mark is using KDE as his desktop and he wants to put more resources into KDE doesn't mean that the Gnome side of Ubuntu is going to suffer. There could be many reasons for his new found interest in Kubuntu.

1.From the beginning it seems that Mark felt a little guilty that he had to pick one desktop to really do well. I know a lot of people think "just do one thing and do it well" is an admirable philosophy, but in the GNU world that is the path to weakness. The Linux Desktop is chaos and unless you want to spend enough to harness that chaos you HAVE to make some big decisions like that. When he first started with Ubuntu, he had no idea how successful it was going to be. He had not idea if the whole thing would be a waste of money, or that no one would care. But now that Ubuntu is making a huge splash in the Linux world and is making noise across the globe Mark has decided that he is willing to commit more of his resources to the entire Ubuntu project. He set up the Ubuntu foundation and gave it $10 million to begin with. So a new commitment to KDE and Kubuntu DOES NOT MEAN THAT UBUNTU WILL HAVE LESS, just that probably he will be willing to give more overall to help the KDE side as well.

2.Despite its relative popularity, the Kubuntu side of the project has not had nearly the resources the other side has gotten so far. The Kubuntu maintainer- Jonathan Riddell - did a lot of the work in its free time. At first he was only given a smallish contract at the end of releases to help get them in better shape. I bet that if Mark is serious about Kubuntu it will finally have a full time developer (if that is not already the case).

3.A big goal of the entire Ubuntu project for Mark is his Edubuntu side project. Well in all honesty Kubuntu might be a better fit for that project than Ubuntu for a few reasons: the The KDE Edutainment Project is the single best educational software on the GNU desktop and is far more developed than anything on the Gnome side. Plus KDE uses less RAM (this is my own opinion) so it might be a better fit for the older computers that many schools might have today. Gnome hates to have less than 256mb, and you can't build a user friendly desktop around XFCE (and it would probably take less resources to make Kubuntu better than to fix all of Gnome's RAM problems single handily). So a better KDE is better for the Kubuntu project.

4.The entire Ubuntu community has been trying better to make the KDE side seem like an equal ever since it was announced. On the Official Forums we have separated KDE and Gnome areas for the Breezy release, and beyond that a forum independent forum was made by a third party for Kubuntu. So in some ways Mark is just catching up to the rest of the community.

The last thing any Gnome fan and Ubuntu user needs to think is that "the sky is falling." This is a GOOD thing for you Gnome fans. Why? A better Kubuntu will bring more people to the distro and that could help build the overall community. A better Kubuntu will help establish the entire project as THE Desktop Linux which would help with gaining support of third party application makers that won't release for anything not called Red Hat. A better Kubuntu shows that Mark is becoming even more devoted to the project, and considering the man makes more off of investments than the entire Linux service industry more of his support means that the entire project is is better shape. Finally, a better Kubuntu means that there is more choice in the community and that the entire project is maturing. Its a good time to be a Desktop Linux user.

The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con

The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con

The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con

The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con

So far, donations from "KDE enthusiasts" have been drop in the bucket.

http://kde.org/support/donations.php

Now, if Novell reduces or nixes its financial support, KDE may be in BIG trouble.

Some more must-have KDE/QT desktop applications:

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Cervisia -- User-friendly GUI frontend for CVS.

Some more must-have KDE/QT desktop applications:

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Cervisia -- User-friendly GUI frontend for CVS.

I think a lot of Suse customers will not be so pleased.

Of course SUSE customers won't be pleased. There are many must-have desktop apps built on the KDE framework that don't have any good gtk equivalents:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Konqueror File Manager" -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

QT designer for GUI development

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

BKSys environmentfor a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool+automake+autoconf+make) that will make dependency a whole lot more simpler and efficient.

Gnome is way behind KDE with regards to these features. The only reason Redhat's doing so well with Gnome is because they're targeting geeky sysadmins who don't care about having a good-looking desktop. The other 99% of the world does care, and gnome just doesn't fit the bill.

I think a lot of Suse customers will not be so pleased.

Of course SUSE customers won't be pleased. There are many must-have desktop apps built on the KDE framework that don't have any good gtk equivalents:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Konqueror File Manager" -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

QT designer for GUI development

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

BKSys environmentfor a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool+automake+autoconf+make) that will make dependency a whole lot more simpler and efficient.

Gnome is way behind KDE with regards to these features. The only reason Redhat's doing so well with Gnome is because they're targeting geeky sysadmins who don't care about having a good-looking desktop. The other 99% of the world does care, and gnome just doesn't fit the bill.

I think a lot of Suse customers will not be so pleased.

Of course SUSE customers won't be pleased. There are many must-have desktop apps built on the KDE framework that don't have any good gtk equivalents:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Konqueror File Manager" -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

QT designer for GUI development

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

BKSys environmentfor a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool+automake+autoconf+make) that will make dependency a whole lot more simpler and efficient.

Gnome is way behind KDE with regards to these features. The only reason Redhat's doing so well with Gnome is because they're targeting geeky sysadmins who don't care about having a good-looking desktop. The other 99% of the world does care, and gnome just doesn't fit the bill.

• Gnome in Korea, too cool for words.
• KDE in Korea.
• Microsoft in Korea

The quesion is, can a single company do as much as an entire country can on it's own? I doubt it and so does Microsoft. Why else would they buy off their competition? They should have all confidence they will prevail without such tricks. The trend outlined above indicates they have no such confidence and can't really keep up.

The screenshots above speak for themselves, even if your browser does not support the characters a default install of Mepis does. The Microsoft programs are unmodified English language programs. Free software has Korean character support and translations that Koreans are giving themselves. It's difficult to see how M$ can maintain dominance without doing more than writing korean language how-to's.

The cause of 80% of the amaroK crashes are its dependencies. Specifically taglib.

Make sure amaroK and ALL its dependencies are build with the same compiler and amaroK will be stable as a rock.

You might want to check http://amarok.kde.org/amarokwiki for more info on that.

I've always wanted to try out Google's desktop, but running it on wine on my linux box just doesn't convince me enough. Google has been labelling themselves a "Digital Services Infrastructure Company" (Stahlman) and provide a good number of services accessible through a browser. I do understand that facilitating a desktop search requires native access to the platform making a completely browser based solution unsuitable or insecure. However, it would be nice to see Google at least provide a framework or API if not actually write a portable application usable across platforms. Gnome users would probably be banking on beagle performing the same roles and KDE users may have to wait a while before a strong equivalent (Tenor) comes in.

While it is true that Google doesn't seem to have put a foot wrong yet, I do notice that many of their applications (Picasa et al) seem to be tailored for Microsoft platforms. For the moment this is in line with their attempt in becoming an all-pervasive "digital infrastructure" company. I wonder if many GNU/Linux enthusiasts find it a bit frustrating not to be able to try out these applications (or am I missing a link somewhere ..?)

It's interesting to note that in the mobile web browser space, Nokia has supported or licensed a number of different players. They've licensed Opera for a long time, they've helped fund Minimo (Mozilla/Gecko), and of course they've just announced their own KHTML-based browser.

They seem to recognize that they're better off with choices -- if KHTML works best on one device, maybe Gecko will work best on another. Maybe Opera will be the best choice in another device, but they don't want to be stuck if, say, Opera's licensing deal becomes prohibitive, or Gecko or KHTML goes off in a completely new direction.

I have been using Kate. I'm more or less happy with it. I have yet to find a way to write Perl scripts or any other kind of script to process text.

I want a GUI text editor that has some flexibility in the way of custom scripting and some common tools like increase and decrease indent of a selected block, syntax highlighting, commenting a selected block, changing case, stripping HTML tags, joining split lines, etc. (Some of this is available in Kate.)

Some features are nice, too, like line numbers, a replace feature with good regex support... and, of course, it has to be capable of opening/saving via SFTP.

Apparently you missed the followups. They gave the KDE developers access to the CVS logs.

http://dot.kde.org/1118138374/

KOffice is the Office suite developed as part of KDE, and from personal experience I can say that it is a whole lot snappier at boot-time, requires less memory, and needs far less hard-drive space to install.

KOffice developers are also quick to note that they find it a whole lot easier to work with a codebase that was designed from the beginning to be lean. Staroffice (the commercial, closed-source predecessor of OpenOffice.org) was initially designed to be completely self-sufficient so as to run without many dependencies. That accounts for part of OpenOffice.org's current bloat.

Gary Silverman recently discovered klik: "1 yr. ago I taught my 71 aged Grandma how to use Kanotix + email/KMail + webbrowsing/Konqueror. She really enjoyed it. 3 months ago she phoned my and complained: Why hadn't I told her about that easy one-click installation method of new software?! I didnt get what she wanted to explain to me. She got angry and hang up, when I told her this was impossible... Last month we went to visit her. She showed me how to do it. You can imagine that my jaws dropped 10+ inches. I must have displayed the most stupid face I ever made in my life."
Source: http://dot.kde.org/1126867980/

So if you would like to see yourself: http://klik.atekon.de/

Our company moved most of the users (~85%) to Debian/Linux 3 months ago and the users seem to be very pleased with KDE desktop. The rest of the users will continue using XP for about a year or so, until some issues are resolved. We will not be upgrading.

Did you notice how much this interface looked like AmaroK? http://amarok.kde.org/index.php?set_albumName=albu m03&id=07_G&option=com_gallery&Itemid=60&include=v iew_photo.php

because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

WRONG! Please mod parent flamebait.

You're confusing paid versions with proprietary versions. You can make money selling paid versions of Free and Open Source Software.

QT is licenced under the GPL, which is a Free and Open Source Software license. It forces software vendors to share the source code, but does not prohibit vendors from selling binaries.

Anyone (ranging from independent programmers to multibllion dollar companies) can create Free and Open Source Software built on QT and can sell the resultant software without giving a penny to Trolltech. Just look at Novell SUSE Linux, Linspire, RedHat and any other commercial distro that ships with KDE. These companies (and anyone else for that matter, including you!) can sell the binaries -- all they have to do is provide the source code to the user, so that the user can customize the software for his/her needs.

If you want to keep your source code secret and build proprietary applications that lock in users, prevent them from making modifications, restrict their rights, take away control of their computers, then naturally you need to pay royalties. In the world of spyware, DRM-infestation, and Treacherous Computing no proprietary software should be trusted.

In other words: If a company does the moral thing for the users and society, the company gets a freebie. If they're unscrupulous, then they better pay up.

Good MSN with all smileys, filetransfer, videochat.
I think these people must have missed Kopete.
Using a nifty script you can download the official icons from the MSN server and use them without a problem. It has had file transfer support for ages now, and has acquired webcam support quite recently.

Support for all streaming media in your webbrowser.
Mplayer-plugin is a Mozilla/Firefox plugin that lets you display Windows Media, QuickTime, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis, and Real format movie clips in your web browser. Works perfectly for me.

Oh yeah, for the transition, full NTFS writing support.
Moving from NTFS to ext3 or Reiser shouldn't require NTFS write support, should it? With that said, Captive has been providing this for a while.. never used it myself, but I hear good things about it.

Happy?

If you use Kopete (sorry, KDE only) for your IM client, you can configure it to make a little speech bubble pop up near the taskbar instead of a window that steals your focus. Someone actually IM'd me when I was typing this post, here's a screenshot. It shows you part of the message, and "View" and "Ignore" buttons.
---
I'm actually just a script.
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey

I use kopete (http://kopete.kde.org/ which is basically KDE's equivalent of gaim (yes, I know one can run gaim just as well on KDE too, but read on). Being a KDE user, I prefere kopete over gaim because of its excellent integration with KMail and the rest of the PIM suite. Evolution users might feel the same way towards Gaim. Voice chat and video support is being actively worked on, including support of Y! quirks like "Buzz!". All in all, I have nothing to complain about the state of IMs in Linux -- I have helped several friends switch to gaim/kopete with no complaints.

Ah yes. developer's mailinglist says it is in SVN and is being worked on. They are trying to have it ready in time for the 3.5 release of KDE Q4 2005 or Q1 2006. It also indicates, not surprisingly, that it does not work just as often as it does work.

I'd have to classify this as alpha or not ready for prime time. But, the fact that they are working on it is far more promising than the past few years.

It's called the appeal project (http://appeal.kde.org/ and this Tango project has simply been dreamed up as a response. It's a direct rip-off actually. I mean come on:

The Tango Project is a collaborative effort of a variety of free/open-source software designers and artists

Jakub Steiner even talks about standards (freedesktop.org!! - standards!!) on his weblog (http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php). Err, sorry but you're not creating yet more non-existant standards to throw around just so you can say certain people aren't collaborating. This is a solution looking for a problem because the problem is already being alooked at. I can't see KDE adopting anything like this as a standard, and I doubt whether Gnome would as well because it would mean some large changes to their HIG as well as other things. This sentence kills the project stone-dead before it has even started:

While there are things you can already grab and start using on your desktop, we are making this public in an early stage as the key elements of the project are the actual standards we want people from various projects agree on.

Right. So we create an independent project, create lots of Gnome-oriented stuff, possibly submit it to Freedesktop and then push it as a standard? Right......

and he makes this comment further down:

Chris, the goal here is to find a sane compromise. We need to get rid of those icon attributes that would make an application feel out of place. If everyone else is using saturated colors, going against the stream isn't going to help us.

What project is going to adopt that! This guy has certainly got the wrong end of the stick here. I can't see this lasting at all.

If making apps not look out of place really is their goal though they can do worse than to just ask the KDE people and adopt the QtGTK theme engine and work on it. Somehow I can't see any of that happening.

KDE with the Baghira theme is already a viable FOSS alternative to MAC OS X eyecandy.

They should get in contact with KDE's Appeal Project, which has very similar goals, namely to provide:
Consistent User Experience
Breathtaking Beauty
Usability
Creativity and Innovation

and to do it all in an open, receptive, adaptive and friendly environment for contributors.

All the organizational effort companies like Novell are putting into bringing GUI developers together makes me really excited about the ever-accelerating Linux Desktop. Keep up the great work!

There's more details on the KDE wiki, where they mention the tests shown in the videos as well as other KDE tests.

So I doubt there's some sort of anti-KDE conspiracy here. Maybe cutting up 200 videos just takes time?

Write an award-winning browser or desktop environment?

Good comment. Thanks.

Software install is definitely an issue still. When the software you want is included in the distribution, then the install is easier than on windows. Open up whatever package manager you have, and chose the programs you want, and install them. As a bonus, you seamless updates to new versions for all those programs. But installing something that's not in the repository is a pain in the ass.

I know how to compile stuff, but that doesn't make it any less of a pain. Do I have all the required dependencies? There's no easy way to check, just trial and error. ./configure, look at the error, try to guess what package it's missing, install that package, ./configure again. It sucks. Luckily this problem is being approached from a few angles now. Autopackage (http://autopackage.org/), klik (http://dot.kde.org/1126867980/), and zero-install (http://0install.net/) all look really promising. I've tried klik, and it really rocks. Give it a go if you have a chance.

Is it too far fetched to think that they may be aligning themselves towards Gnome as their DE of choice?

Anyways KDE already has http://usability.kde.org/ to take care of usability concerns.

Anyways KDE already has http://usability.kde.org/ to take care of usability concerns.

If we in the OSS world want to be deemed a serious contender, we MUST solve user's problems. As far as Linux goes, software management is still a huge problem.

I have a dream; and I hope the time will come, when if one talks of a software for Linux, this software can install across all Linux based distros.

There is still a lot of features lacking in Thunderbird, partly because I do not see many people incorporating other GPL software into it (are there still licensing issues, or is it fully GPL/LGPL now?).

Things that Thunderbird lacks is:
*Any type of attachment based filters (if it has an attachment, size, etc.). For fuck sakes, even outlook *express* has attachment based filters.
*Auto compacting of folders. When you delete something it really isn't deleted and your folders can grow to huge sizes unless it is 'compacted'.
*Auto expirary of mail. Kmail has it (http://kmail.kde.org/features.html) why not Thunderbird?
*A lot more, just look at some features that have been requested over the past few *years*.

A little less self congradulations, especially with regards to Thunderbird, is in order I think.

Still, java as a language comes close to the speed of C++. So there is less need to "go native". However if you want to, it is no problem. It is hardly more difficult than in TCL (I have used TCL a lot as glue to bind self written modules and available libraries in C together). JNI is not difficult, and we use it too. We don't use it to write our own C modules, because it just isn't worthwhile with Java. But we do use it to bind in existing libraries (such as openssh and some in-house developed networking libraries), and once you know how to do it it doesn't take more time than with similar mechanisms in scripting languages. People have done it for GUI toolkits, e.g. http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/bin/view and http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/java/. There is no technical reason at all that Java can't do the same thing Python can (binding in lots of existing modules) except that the need is hardly there.

The KDE project and Trolltech have carefully protected the future of all software developed on top of the Free QT license.

In the event of a buyout, QT will be re-licensed under a BSD license.

This agreement was negotiated very soon after Trolltech was formed.

I'm not quite sure if the KDE community can maintain the same development pace of QT as trolltech does, but they do have some contingency plans for the QT codebase. see the KDE Free QT Foundation.